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A comment on The Pirate Bay is now hosted in North Korea. Parent comment

Re:The Pirate Bay is now hosted in North Korea by dvdhsu on Monday March 04, 2013 @02:31PM (#5320237)
Comparing the actual number of prisoners in two countries isn't very useful since the two countries have different populations. It would be a little like comparing the food consumed each day by everybody in China, compared to the same number in the US. China will consume more food, simply because they have more people! You can't conclude that Chinese people must be 2-3x fatter just from numbers that don't take the population into account. Instead, you want to use the per-capita food consumption; in your case, you would want to look at per-capita prisoner numbers.

The population of the US is around 315 million. The population of North Korea is around 24 million. [1]

If we divide the number of prisoners by the countries' populations, US incarcenates .69% if their people. Assuming NK incarcenates 175,000, that is .71% of their people. These numbers seem similar enough, so perhaps we should instead look at prison conditions. By all reports, North Korea has significantly worse conditions. It's incorrect to claim that North Korea rulers are "less effective".

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populati...

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Re:The Pirate Bay is now hosted in North Korea by kragen on Tuesday March 05, 2013 @12:21AM (#5323081)
Karla Homolka raped and killed 50% of the people who fell into her power. Adolf Hitler tortured to death only some 10% of the people who fell into his power. Nevertheless, I think it is defensible to assert that Adolf Hitler was "a bigger domestic human rights violator" than Karla Homolka, since she only had three victims, while he had some eleven million.

North Korean rulers are less effective in that North Korea remains a small, poor, weak country; consequently North Korean rulers are only able to incarcerate 0.7% of a much smaller population. They would be much bigger human rights violators if they were able to establish control over a larger territory that included more people, as the US government has over the past century and a half.

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